gentrification

Mark Townsend and Liz Evans, founders of the Portland Hotel Society (PHS) have resigned following two audits from Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) and B.C. Housing that raise questions over the distribution and accounting of administrative fees for a twenty-year old organization that provides homes and harm reduction services to Vancouver's most vulnerable population. The PHS is best known for operating InSite, North America's first and only safe injection site -- a clinic universally lauded by health care professionals and poverty activists worldwide.

After three days of public hearings, Vancouver city council has approved the Downtown Eastside local area plan. The LAP is a 30-year plan for real estate development in the Downtown Eastside, with the aim of accommodating more than 8,850 new condominium dwellers and 3,300 high income renters while dispersing at least 3,350 low-income residents out of the neighbourhood.

Councillors from the rightwing NPA and Vision Vancouver unanimously voted in favour of the plan.

For close to two centuries East Downtown Toronto has welcomed the unemployed, homeless and working poor. Infrastructures to support the unemployed, some of which date back to the establishment of Toronto first poor house to the 1830s, are now being threatened and dismantled by the city to make room for Toronto's more affluent residents. Where will the unemployed, homeless and poor residents go?

This year marks 100 years since the dispossession of the Kitsilano Reserve. Today the renewed displacement and dislocation of diverse communities in East Vancouver gives reason to think critically about our history on unceded Coast Salish Territory. The year 2013 signals the centenary of the destruction at Kitsilano, but it has also been a year marked by the intensification of land struggles in Grandview-Woodlands and the Downtown Eastside, two areas of the city with diverse indigenous communities. This article argues that the 1913 destruction of the Kitsilano reserve is connected to the present through a past that has, in fact, never been resolved.

In conjunction with what seems to be the year of the developer, the recently drafted Grandview-Woodland Community plan brings a new take on density to Vancouver's Broadway and Commercial neighbourhood.

This week another high-end destination restaurant has opened in the heart of the Downtown Eastside, this time in the main floor of the low-income affordable York Rooms hotel at 261 Powell Street. Cuchillo, which means “knife” in Spanish, is a “modern pan-Latin” 93-seat restaurant serving a typical mishmash of appetizer plates and premium cocktails that easily prices out the low-income DTES community. The restaurant space was a long-decommissioned Japanese bathhouse, one of five in the neighbourhood that once served as communal gathering spaces for a thriving working-class Japanese Canadian community.

It has come to my attention that you were in Vancouver this week to announce your new high-end hotel / condo tower in Coal Harbour, near where I work. My fellow citizens and I decided not to picket your event. Instead, I opt for polite correspondence, to respectfully inform you that we are sufficiently supplied with luxury condominiums at present and require no further units. We'll call if we're running low.

Plus, there is a lien on the place. Just ask the original inhabitants.